Humanity’s most far-flung spacecraft, NASA’s 41-year-old Voyager 1, has poked a gap in a long-shot idea of darkish matter. Some theorists have argued that the mysterious, unseen stuff, which makes up 85% of the universe’s matter, might include numerous black holes lingering from the large bang. However Voyager 1, which launched in 1977 and slipped out of the photo voltaic system 6 years in the past, sees no indicators of such hordes, a pair of theoretical physicists stories. The information don’t kill the concept darkish matter is black holes totally, nevertheless, as Voyager 1 can detect solely tiny black holes.

“I by no means thought we’d be capable of contribute in any solution to learning darkish matter,” says Alan Cummings, an area scientist on the California Institute of Expertise in Pasadena who has labored on Voyager 1 since 1973 and who was not concerned within the evaluation. “That’s nice!”

For many years, astrophysicists have thought some form of unseen matter supplies the gravity wanted to carry galaxies like our Milky Manner collectively. For practically as lengthy, some scientists have speculated that darkish matter would possibly include black holes, knots of ultraintense gravitational fields sometimes created when large stars collapse beneath their very own weight to infinitesimal factors.

However making black holes work as darkish matter is hard. Within the universe, darkish matter outweighs bizarre matter six to 1, and there can’t have been sufficient collapsing stars to provide that lopsided ratio. So the black holes would have needed to come up differently, by way of the collapse of tiny fluctuations within the soup of elementary particles that stuffed the new child universe lengthy earlier than stars shaped. Such primordial black holes might have practically any mass, however they can’t be too plentiful with out working afoul of astronomical observations. For instance, throngs of black holes way more large than the solar would shred galaxies like cannon balls crashing by way of chandeliers. Hordes of smaller black holes ought to distort the pictures of extra distant stars and galaxy by way of so-called gravitational lensing.

Such observations go away simply three potential mass ranges for primordial black holes, says Bernard Carr, a cosmologist at Queen Mary College of London, who has labored on the concept for 40 years. They may have plenty between one and 10 occasions that of the solar; about one-billionth that of the solar; or under a couple of quadrillionth that of the solar—10 billion metric tons. These smallest black holes would solely be as broad as an atomic nucleus.

But when they’re there, the tiny black holes ought to produce a telltale radiation that Voyager 1 ought to see, argue Mathieu Boudaud and Marco Cirelli, theorists at Sorbonne College in Paris, in a paper in press at Bodily Assessment Letters. Black holes earn their identify as a result of something that will get too shut to 1, even gentle, can’t escape. Nonetheless, in 1973, the late Stephen Hawking reasoned that black holes ought to radiate some gentle and particles nonetheless.

In response to quantum mechanics, empty area roils with particle-antiparticle pairs flitting into and out of existence. Hawking realized that if such a pair pops into existence at simply the correct distance from a black gap then one particle would possibly fall into the black gap whereas the opposite flies away in what’s now known as Hawking radiation. The smaller the black gap, the warmer it might be and the extra it might radiate.

Tiny black holes weighing 10 billion metric tons ought to be scorching sufficient to radiate electrons and positrons. Earth-bound detectors wouldn’t be capable of spot these low-energy particles, as they’d be deflected by the solar’s magnetic discipline. However Voyager 1 ought to be capable of spot them from its place exterior the solar’s magnetic bubble, the heliosphere.

The truth is, because it exited the heliosphere in 2012, Voyager 1 has measured a small, constant flux of positrons and electrons. However even when all of them come from tiny black holes, there wouldn’t be sufficient black holes to account for greater than 1% of the Milky Manner’s darkish matter, Boudaud and Cirelli calculate. Cummings says the vitality spectrum of the particles suggests all of them come from extra mundane sources such because the remnants of supernova explosions.

The brand new work comes near ruling out the bottom mass primordial black holes as darkish matter, Carr says, though he provides that he has at all times favored the state of affairs through which the black holes weigh a number of photo voltaic plenty. “This [low] mass window has by no means been my favourite,” he says. “It doesn’t personally hassle me if the constraints now rule it out.”

Voyager 1 can’t seek for the upper mass primordial black holes. They might be so heavy and chilly that they may not radiate large particles corresponding to electrons and positrons. As an alternative, they’d solely shine an exceedingly feeble and certain undetectable gentle. So, for the second, the concept of black gap darkish matter lives on.